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Season Finales: The Best – Golden Boy; The Worst – NCIS

I have just learned that CBS has cancelled “Golden Boy”, the best show on television, bar none, this season. If they don’t pick it back up, I might be forced to trade in my flat-screen for cave wall drawings. I am SOOOOO upset!!! Low ratings on a first year may just mean the viewing public hasn’t caught on yet and it needs a little time. But for Pete’s sake, don’t cancel it!!! Our varied family circles around here could talk of nothing else last night but what a great end of the season show it was and couldn’t wait for the next season.

Every actor on the show has been several notches above the best on any other show. They are Grade-A Exceptional, each and every one. Bonnie Summerville as Det. Deb McKenzie should set the standard for the best female cop ever on a cop show. She is everything that Stana Katic (Kate Beckett, Castle) and Sela Ward (Jo Friday Danville, CSI NY) are absolutely NOT.

The writing on the show was superb. Dialogue perfect. I was drawn into every episode, and so was everybody in my circle. The finale last night was better than most big-screen theater movies, and I would have been happy to have PAID to go see it.

This show has been about relationships, and NOT the cheap soap opera kind. It’s about a brother and sister who were abandoned by an alcoholic/drug addict mother and a seamy, lawless father. The young man (Theo James as Walter William Clark, Jr – aka “Golden Boy”) has ambitions as a detective, while at the same time trying to protect his younger sister from the very parents who pursue only their own interests.

The boy is taken in hand by his partner, Don Owen, (Chi McBride) an old veteran detective, who calls him Junior and tries to instill some wisdom into him. Det. Owen, two years from retirement, tries to apply some brakes to Junior’s over-zealous ambition, telling him in plain terms that it can only lead to compromise and disaster.

The show always begins with the hindsight of a future in which Golden Boy has risen to the pinnacle of success. But at such a price. And therein lies the story. I want to know all the details of what that price entailed.

It ended last night with these cliffhangers:

Det. Clark Junior’s trusting sister, Agnes (Stella Maeve), who longs for a parental relationship, gets trustingly into the car with her scumbag dad who lives his life with criminal bottom crawlers.

Det. Clark Junior and his journalist girlfriend are accosted in a restaurant by her ex-husband who pulls a gun and shoots.

In an already strained relationship between the Golden Boy and also-ambitious Det. Arroyo (Kevin Alejandro), Det. Clark Junior slugs him and handcuffs him to a pipe in a back alley so his partner, Det. Owen, can get his long-earned promotion without interference.

And if the viewing public can’t back up an exceptional show like this while still comfortably watching NCIS, whose season finale was a mishmash of absolute zero, it gets what it deserves — half-naked reality imbeciles mouthing stupidities into a camera. In other worlds: NOTHING to watch that has any substance whatsoever.

I shouldn’t blog when I’m angry. But that one threw me for a loop. It was a show we looked forward to every week and cared what happened to the characters. As for NCIS, Mike and I got in on that bandwagon a little late and it has been entertaining, if not one to wow. But the finale the other night was just a cheap hodgepodge. Golden Boy has some structure and character as it looks back at how over-weaning ambition and its goal – success at all cost – come at a price that is hard to be borne. I don’t know how long they could have carried that line, but I certainly hoped for more than one season.

Well, if you blog when you’re angry, you’re more likely to say what you really think. Of all the shows canceled so far, “Smash” is the ony one I’ll miss. Maybe it’s just that I’m from NYC, but I loved all the machinations that went on behind the scenes of mounting a Broadway musical. I like “Nashville,” too, and it was spared. Do you watch that? It has some terrific original country music, all written by T Bone Burnett.

I want Candice to win Idol tonight, but I have a very strong gut feeling it will be Kree.